In computer security, every time machines become fast enough to breach the limits of an algorithm we invent something new so that “hard” problems remain “hard” and therefore encryption is still secure.
There has been no corresponding increase in the difficulty of invading privacy. 30 years ago, even though you probably “could” observe somebody for a long time and eventually connect some dots about them, it would not really have been worth your while (and you certainly wouldn’t have been able to do it for thousands or millions of people). Now, it is ridiculously easy for computers to dredge up information and instantly transmit it, slog through it and basically connect every imaginable dot. There needs to be a new standard for privacy: just like you want a 2048-bit key, you want the equivalent of a “make life a pain in the ass for Facebook” key on EVERY DETAIL of your life.
The bigger problem for me is how facebook tracks and identifies even people who do not have a facebook account. They simply infer such a person exists from photograps, contacts and other one sided activity and can start to track that person, tie all this information together and then target them with ads even though they never signed up for Facebook.
Such shadow profiles are a much larger problem to me than people who are happy to fork over their private lives themselves.
Nothing will change until the law cracks down on this. The people who work on these systems are smart enough to comprehend the wider consequences, but they do it anyway because money. Without significant external pressure, there will always be a long line of engineers willing to dial their cognitive dissonance up to 11 and build software that is clearly unethical in exchange for a fat paycheck.
People don't seem to realise the ecological harm (privacy wise) in using those services. They don't realise that by using those services, they not only harm their own privacy (which is their to shed), but also other's.
The sentence "I have nothing to hide" that often gets thrown about has two problems. The first is obvious: whoever says it most probably do have something to hide, and are not quite realising it. The second is much more insidious: it frames the debate individualistically. This is a common flaw in our western societies —see for instance copyright debates talking about one artist and one consumer or pirate.
People should realise, as you did, that it is not just about them. I would go even further: using Facebook is not just a personal choice. It's a political one, that affects all around you.
Last year for instance, I was forced to use Facebook by friends from my orchestra. I reluctantly set up an account, and kept up for a while. Then I turn off email notifications because they were so annoying. Then I learned, several times, of decisions or events that were discussed only on Facebook, (without my knowledge since I hardly logged in). When they clued in on my ignorance, they said "but I sent the mail" (no you didn't).
(I have since "deleted" my account. I won't use that crap ever again)
The choice is often between giving up your privacy on Facebook, and being ostracised by such and such group of friends. Disgusting.
And how are they hitting that person with a tracking pixel and associating it with the pseudo-account?
It's still creepy, but it's likely more about determining knowledge of the friend graph (i.e. suggesting 2nd degree friends via a connecting pseudo-account) than about ad targeting.
Though yes, as soon as that pseudo-account could be tied to an actual account, Facebook could use passively gathered info to target you.
The creepiest part about Facebook is the sheer volume of facial data paired with social connection data. With access to that, even if you have never been online in your entire life, there's a good chance I could take your driver's license photo and know who you associate with.
Mentioned shadow profiles and some other of their shady practices to an acquaintance recently, he uses fb and wanted to stay in touch using it. He chose not to listen to my critique of fb calling me a "tinfoil hat" (whatever that even means).
you basically hit the nail on the head. And if Obama did nothing about it, you can sure expect Trump to follow suit with inaction as well. The consumer's only hope here is the EU.
That's actually why I gave up on avoiding it (after leaving my fb account dormant for ~5 years). If I'm being tracked anyway I might as well enjoy the social benefits of the platform, which are not insignificant.
FB absolutely knows more about me than any individual person at this point. I've decided, for good or ill, to accept that and leverage it; rather than feeling upset about my inability to enforce a right to privacy, I've decided it's more important that I should be able to enjoy being myself rather than having to hide everything. If powerful forces wish to abuse that, they can, but I'm happy to have that moral argument.
Facebook's dominance is even more pronounced in parts of the developing world. I've met people in Asia (Myanmar and Nepal) who have just accessed the internet for the first time in the past 12-24 months (through their Android smartphones).
But they don't know the true internet - they only know the internet through the Facebook app. They use it like we use Google and web browsers.
To them, Facebook is the internet. They don't have email accounts. They don't use the browser. They don't search. I met someone in a small town who never even used the maps feature. I tried to think of what value the true internet might bring them, but when I suggested that "you can search for news and read other things", the response was that they already did that with the Facebook App.
One guy handed me his phone, so I could add myself as a friend on his Facebook. While I started typing my name, I noticed his search history... and to him, Facebook was even a substitute for what people in the USA might use Incognito mode for!
I would call Facebook their internet portal, but it's not really a portal to anything - Facebook is just the entire internet to them.
Buzzfeed (yes, Buzzfeed) did an excellent writeup of Myanmar, that mirrors what I saw there:
“Nobody asks, they don’t care about the email,” he said, explaining that most don’t know that creating an email address is free, and easy. “No one is using that. They have Facebook.”
Google does some pretty scary stuff too.
I made a point of never giving them my mobile number or any "real information" about me.
When a friend of mine added me to his contacts, on his Android phone, he also added one of email addresses to the contact, which is the same one I used to register my Google account.
The phone automatically connected the mail address to my Google account and now every time I call him the (anonymous) picture of my Google profile shows up on his phone. Which I guess means that Google now also connected that phone number to the mail address/Google account.
Tbh that's really offputting: You can be as careful as you want and it will still be all for naught because friends&family just end up leaking your details everywhere without even noticing it.
The phone automatically connected the mail address to my Google account and now every time I call him the (anonymous) picture of my Google profile shows up on his phone.
That behavior doesn't require Google to have associated your phone number with your account; the mapping could be happening entirely on your friend's phone.
I had a similar realization when I found a private photo, so private that I had deleted it from everywhere in some Google's "backup" sites. I am very careful disabling every feature that could mean that personal images or text from my phone will end up "in the cloud" and still it got there through an accident... and a lot of Google's disregard for my wills. It's almost impossible to stop them.
The photo being private is most likely not what you think :)
Could you help me understand why you find that scary? It's not giving him any information which wasn't previously available to him. I think you're concerned that people are overlooking his screen, and you'd rather he explicitly choose everything that pops up when you call? Do you think he wouldn't have included any identifying information about you?
As a user, I'd rather have not only a name but also a picture of a person pop up when they call me, and I'd rather it happen with as little work as possible on my part.
(disclaimer: I work for Google, although I had nothing to do with how this works)
It occurs to me that I'd like to see some reportage on which parts of the TOS cover these evergreen frustrations. Is it the "share your information with third parties" clause? Is it "to improve Google services?" Something else? Surely every element of surprise can be responded to with "Oh, well you gave them that permission in Section F, subsection 3(n)."
I wonder if I could exploit this to make false associations, e.g. save an email address with someone else's number to make that profile pop up whenever that person calls someone.
"All of us, when we are uploading something, when we are tagging people, when we are commenting, we are basically working for Facebook,"
Tapping, scrolling and even just having the app with Location Services installed means we are actively working for Facebook, and Facebook is actively working on us.
We are effectively lab rats to this self-perpetuating Orwellian superbeing. Nothing will stop it. It will use any means necessary to increase its yield of attention spend. Increases in HCI bandwidth will only extend its tentacles, eventually digging an orifice into our brains, Matrix/Neuralink-style, to run tests on us about how to better harvest us.
Before that, some of us will already be living on Planet Oculus.
The next Trust has earned that status like 5 years ago, yet here we are, still just gathering data.
The resource it trades in is intrinsically more valuable to Man than Oil. How much do you value your time, considering that is how you measure life? 2B users, people. How many lifetimes are spent a second on Facebook?
I've posted it before, and I'll post it again. I've never been a big fan of facebook, having deleted it for years after I started dating my first girlfriend, but unfortunately it is the only way to access Tinder now that we are broken up.
Facebook is addicting. I would scroll, like, and get into political arguments. They knew how to play me.
About five months ago I went in and unfollowed literally every single person on my facebook. I deleted every post I'd ever made. I locked down every privacy setting I could.
Since then, besides messenger, I have spent probably a total of an hour or two on facebook (in five months!). I can not heartily enough recommend doing the same to every person who might so read this.
Social media has done some amazing things in terms of coordination of people's who might not otherwise be able to connect. But their addictive algorithms which concentrate and sell information on billions of human beings are presumably a threat to us all.
It annoys me how much I want to leave Facebook (if only to stop them gathering MORE data on me - I can't erase what they have) but don't because of the convenience of getting in touch with or finding out more about whoever I meet in meatspace.
The fact that they try to force me to install their messenger app by making messaging through a mobile browser difficult is particularly infuriating and reveals how much they have their intentions at centre and not the benefit of their users/products/suckers (whatever you want to call us) now that they have the critical mass that people like me don't leave because everyone else is on it.
> The fact that they try to force me to install their messenger app
Treat it as asynchronous communication, using a client like Swipe for Facebook (for Android, don't know about iOS alternatives) to look at messages when you feel like doing it.
Use another app for synchronous purposes. Facebook's own WhatsApp is a lot more secure, for starters.
I did it two years ago. Never been a problem. Sms and calling still exist. People started to write me nice emails. The feeling you are missing something is gone arter two weeks.
Actually only thing that is somehow annoying are events. Its facebook secret sauce. They limit the api (you cant add events through api > no automatic repost) so every event around me ends up only on fb. I am talking about public events, concerts, lectures etc. Venues are using fb as calendar so much that many of them dont even put it on their own site anymore.
Yeah, the way they prevent you from reading public posts, sometimes cutting them off half way through to demand you make an account really pisses me off.
Same for Yelp who makes you install the app if you want to view more than 10 photos.
On Android there is the app Metal, which is basically a browser that shows the facebook page. It has a few tweaks to improve the user experience and because its a browser facebook cannot access contacts, gps etc. Messaging works. It's great.
Is it ? I read the article and was pissed that there was no link to the actual charts or source.
I'm not sure what you're referring to with big data phobia, computer related privacy concerns have been around for a couple decades before facebook beginnings, IIRC it was a thing a few years before zuckerberg's birth. Then privacy concerns about facebook have existed a little while before its conception with Facemash.
It doesn't read as sponsored, it'd be more circumspect. More like, the reporter found it and thought it was cool so he interviewed "Dr Julia Powles" about it so he could write an article on it. You can ask him on Twitter: https://twitter.com/joemillerjr
When Facebook has pwned everything that's left to pwn, are we going to look back and say, oh, we were warned, why didn't we heed the warning of all those writers... who had "like" links on their page before the content even started. No.
I read the Share Lab metadata report, based on an examination of the metadata in the headers of the emails exchanged between Hacking Team members. The level of detail this provides on the network and on the individual members of the team is extraordinary. Now in the case of Facebook, imagine that times 100, then add AI to slice and dice the data better than a team of the world's top 1000 data scientists working on the analysis of some tiny portion of the data for some particular purpose, for a year... Just one consequence: think of what Facebook and Google have on every politician in the United States, in the world.
There was an interesting article published on arxiv 10 days ago titled: Social Media-based Substance Use Prediction or as MITTechRev titled it: Your Facebook activity can reveal whether you are a substance abuser..
I signed up for facebook two years ago, didn't put any real information on there, then haven't touched it since. I still get emails about "people you might know" that they have absolutely no business knowing about and aren't in any way connected to my immediate family. It's creepy and I don't want them storing that information about me, but there's nothing I can do. I've been cautious about putting my information on the internet since I got my first computer in 1995. But that information got out there somehow anyway.
I created a Facebook account because I was doing something with a Facebook API, long enough ago that I have forgotten the details of the project. However, lurking in my spam folder there is always 'you have more friends than you might think' as a subject line in there somewhere, from Facebook, trying to lure me back in.
The thing I find funny about this is that they only send out emails with that one subject line. I don't open the emails so the suggested 'friends' might be different with each email, however I am curious why they don't change the subject line, to 'A/B test' me into being part of the known universe of Facebook. Clearly 'you have more friends than you think...' has not worked.
If they had bothered with the 'shadow account' then they would have targetted me a bit better, if they found a Facebook group that was likely to appeal to me then they could theoretically lure me in with 'Cats with Facebook accounts in your area' or 'Today's pictures of squirrels enjoying lunch...' but no, let's just try the email that didn't work last time or the time before.
Sure they have surreal algorithms that are totally creepy in a stalker way that is totally Peeping Tom and should gross people out, but, as per the dumb emails there is nothing that smart about what they are doing.
That's the beauty of it, the useds themselves are snitching on their friends. Not only are facebook useds working for facebook for free exposing themselves and others, they also provide troves of metadata.
I think this should be analyzed in connection with Uber's GreyBalling (https://www.google.pl/search?q=greyballing), and maybe also with the diesel emission cheats. Corporations are gaining power and sooner or later they'll start disregard the law - because states will not be able to enforce it.
So the American TV show "Person of Interest" really isn't that far off the mark. If FB is a known and readily available commercial product, imagine what DARPA, NSA, NGIA, etc. must have.
[+] [-] makecheck|8 years ago|reply
There has been no corresponding increase in the difficulty of invading privacy. 30 years ago, even though you probably “could” observe somebody for a long time and eventually connect some dots about them, it would not really have been worth your while (and you certainly wouldn’t have been able to do it for thousands or millions of people). Now, it is ridiculously easy for computers to dredge up information and instantly transmit it, slog through it and basically connect every imaginable dot. There needs to be a new standard for privacy: just like you want a 2048-bit key, you want the equivalent of a “make life a pain in the ass for Facebook” key on EVERY DETAIL of your life.
[+] [-] jacquesm|8 years ago|reply
Such shadow profiles are a much larger problem to me than people who are happy to fork over their private lives themselves.
[+] [-] ghughes|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loup-vaillant|8 years ago|reply
The sentence "I have nothing to hide" that often gets thrown about has two problems. The first is obvious: whoever says it most probably do have something to hide, and are not quite realising it. The second is much more insidious: it frames the debate individualistically. This is a common flaw in our western societies —see for instance copyright debates talking about one artist and one consumer or pirate.
People should realise, as you did, that it is not just about them. I would go even further: using Facebook is not just a personal choice. It's a political one, that affects all around you.
Last year for instance, I was forced to use Facebook by friends from my orchestra. I reluctantly set up an account, and kept up for a while. Then I turn off email notifications because they were so annoying. Then I learned, several times, of decisions or events that were discussed only on Facebook, (without my knowledge since I hardly logged in). When they clued in on my ignorance, they said "but I sent the mail" (no you didn't).
(I have since "deleted" my account. I won't use that crap ever again)
The choice is often between giving up your privacy on Facebook, and being ostracised by such and such group of friends. Disgusting.
[+] [-] kromem|8 years ago|reply
It's still creepy, but it's likely more about determining knowledge of the friend graph (i.e. suggesting 2nd degree friends via a connecting pseudo-account) than about ad targeting.
Though yes, as soon as that pseudo-account could be tied to an actual account, Facebook could use passively gathered info to target you.
The creepiest part about Facebook is the sheer volume of facial data paired with social connection data. With access to that, even if you have never been online in your entire life, there's a good chance I could take your driver's license photo and know who you associate with.
[+] [-] linkregister|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] type0|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Crontab|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jgalt212|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anigbrowl|8 years ago|reply
FB absolutely knows more about me than any individual person at this point. I've decided, for good or ill, to accept that and leverage it; rather than feeling upset about my inability to enforce a right to privacy, I've decided it's more important that I should be able to enjoy being myself rather than having to hide everything. If powerful forces wish to abuse that, they can, but I'm happy to have that moral argument.
[+] [-] sjg007|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] corrosive|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taway_1212|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tuna-piano|8 years ago|reply
But they don't know the true internet - they only know the internet through the Facebook app. They use it like we use Google and web browsers.
To them, Facebook is the internet. They don't have email accounts. They don't use the browser. They don't search. I met someone in a small town who never even used the maps feature. I tried to think of what value the true internet might bring them, but when I suggested that "you can search for news and read other things", the response was that they already did that with the Facebook App.
One guy handed me his phone, so I could add myself as a friend on his Facebook. While I started typing my name, I noticed his search history... and to him, Facebook was even a substitute for what people in the USA might use Incognito mode for!
I would call Facebook their internet portal, but it's not really a portal to anything - Facebook is just the entire internet to them.
Buzzfeed (yes, Buzzfeed) did an excellent writeup of Myanmar, that mirrors what I saw there:
https://www.buzzfeed.com/sheerafrenkel/fake-news-spreads-tru...
“Nobody asks, they don’t care about the email,” he said, explaining that most don’t know that creating an email address is free, and easy. “No one is using that. They have Facebook.”
[+] [-] freeflight|8 years ago|reply
The phone automatically connected the mail address to my Google account and now every time I call him the (anonymous) picture of my Google profile shows up on his phone. Which I guess means that Google now also connected that phone number to the mail address/Google account.
Tbh that's really offputting: You can be as careful as you want and it will still be all for naught because friends&family just end up leaking your details everywhere without even noticing it.
[+] [-] orangecat|8 years ago|reply
That behavior doesn't require Google to have associated your phone number with your account; the mapping could be happening entirely on your friend's phone.
[+] [-] narag|8 years ago|reply
The photo being private is most likely not what you think :)
[+] [-] scottlamb|8 years ago|reply
As a user, I'd rather have not only a name but also a picture of a person pop up when they call me, and I'd rather it happen with as little work as possible on my part.
(disclaimer: I work for Google, although I had nothing to do with how this works)
[+] [-] rhizome|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] linkregister|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rayday|8 years ago|reply
Tapping, scrolling and even just having the app with Location Services installed means we are actively working for Facebook, and Facebook is actively working on us.
We are effectively lab rats to this self-perpetuating Orwellian superbeing. Nothing will stop it. It will use any means necessary to increase its yield of attention spend. Increases in HCI bandwidth will only extend its tentacles, eventually digging an orifice into our brains, Matrix/Neuralink-style, to run tests on us about how to better harvest us.
Before that, some of us will already be living on Planet Oculus.
The next Trust has earned that status like 5 years ago, yet here we are, still just gathering data.
The resource it trades in is intrinsically more valuable to Man than Oil. How much do you value your time, considering that is how you measure life? 2B users, people. How many lifetimes are spent a second on Facebook?
I fear we may regret this in the future.
[+] [-] 659087|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erikpukinskis|8 years ago|reply
Problem solved. Once kids can do it too it loses its power.
[+] [-] codyb|8 years ago|reply
Facebook is addicting. I would scroll, like, and get into political arguments. They knew how to play me.
About five months ago I went in and unfollowed literally every single person on my facebook. I deleted every post I'd ever made. I locked down every privacy setting I could.
Since then, besides messenger, I have spent probably a total of an hour or two on facebook (in five months!). I can not heartily enough recommend doing the same to every person who might so read this.
Social media has done some amazing things in terms of coordination of people's who might not otherwise be able to connect. But their addictive algorithms which concentrate and sell information on billions of human beings are presumably a threat to us all.
I am not sure what to do.
[+] [-] nstart|8 years ago|reply
https://labs.rs/en/category/facebook-research/
[+] [-] cconcepts|8 years ago|reply
The fact that they try to force me to install their messenger app by making messaging through a mobile browser difficult is particularly infuriating and reveals how much they have their intentions at centre and not the benefit of their users/products/suckers (whatever you want to call us) now that they have the critical mass that people like me don't leave because everyone else is on it.
[+] [-] mixedCase|8 years ago|reply
Treat it as asynchronous communication, using a client like Swipe for Facebook (for Android, don't know about iOS alternatives) to look at messages when you feel like doing it.
Use another app for synchronous purposes. Facebook's own WhatsApp is a lot more secure, for starters.
[+] [-] omnimus|8 years ago|reply
Actually only thing that is somehow annoying are events. Its facebook secret sauce. They limit the api (you cant add events through api > no automatic repost) so every event around me ends up only on fb. I am talking about public events, concerts, lectures etc. Venues are using fb as calendar so much that many of them dont even put it on their own site anymore.
[+] [-] erikpukinskis|8 years ago|reply
Same for Yelp who makes you install the app if you want to view more than 10 photos.
[+] [-] shinypotatoe|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bduerst|8 years ago|reply
>"Facebook has lots of data and we have no idea what they do with it, but here's what the smart people at Share Lab can do with data."
[+] [-] bigbugbag|8 years ago|reply
I'm not sure what you're referring to with big data phobia, computer related privacy concerns have been around for a couple decades before facebook beginnings, IIRC it was a thing a few years before zuckerberg's birth. Then privacy concerns about facebook have existed a little while before its conception with Facemash.
[+] [-] Mathnerd314|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gavinpc|8 years ago|reply
When Facebook has pwned everything that's left to pwn, are we going to look back and say, oh, we were warned, why didn't we heed the warning of all those writers... who had "like" links on their page before the content even started. No.
[+] [-] bipr0|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aargh_aargh|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hammock|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eveningcoffee|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ucaetano|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gub09|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vkreso|8 years ago|reply
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607943/how-data-mining-fa...
https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.05633
[+] [-] c3534l|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Theodores|8 years ago|reply
The thing I find funny about this is that they only send out emails with that one subject line. I don't open the emails so the suggested 'friends' might be different with each email, however I am curious why they don't change the subject line, to 'A/B test' me into being part of the known universe of Facebook. Clearly 'you have more friends than you think...' has not worked.
If they had bothered with the 'shadow account' then they would have targetted me a bit better, if they found a Facebook group that was likely to appeal to me then they could theoretically lure me in with 'Cats with Facebook accounts in your area' or 'Today's pictures of squirrels enjoying lunch...' but no, let's just try the email that didn't work last time or the time before.
Sure they have surreal algorithms that are totally creepy in a stalker way that is totally Peeping Tom and should gross people out, but, as per the dumb emails there is nothing that smart about what they are doing.
[+] [-] bigbugbag|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zby|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaza|8 years ago|reply
http://greenash.net.au/thoughts/2011/10/dont-trust-facebook-...
[+] [-] jotadambalakiri|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chiefalchemist|8 years ago|reply
God bless George Orwell.
[+] [-] 659087|8 years ago|reply
DARPA, NSA, GOOG, CIA, FB, etc
[+] [-] 659087|8 years ago|reply